Ghost of Shakespeare

Granted, we tire of hearing about death, writing about death, especially when genesis may be, for the most part, much more interesting. The countryside is already filled with enough ghosts, wandering, starving. Black ribbons on a beehive, black spot in our palm. The owls tell us every night where we are going.

Yet, not all can be only harbinger to winter, even when that will also melt away, leaving the stage to other seasons. And even winter has some its own hints of growth, its own secret sleepings. Secret summer sky safely sequestered far from the margins of stone like water and iron road, under the frozen moon’s steel gaze.

Then there is spring, fostering randy thoughts. Bawdy thoughts. Even naughty thoughts, although ‘naughty’ depends largely on perspective. Georges Bataille tells us, “We must not forget, however, that outside of Christianity the religious and sacred nature of eroticism is shown in the full light of day, sacredness dominating shame.”*

And, truth be told, sex and death are, arguably, two peas in one proverbial pod of human perception, of human experience. Bataille assures us that man’s “erotic urges terrify him”, and we deeply suspect that this may be at least partly because the ‘petit mort’, the little death of orgasm brings oblivion, destroying the individual, albeit momentarily, in its wake.

This threat of vanishing completely may make sex terrifying, but seems that the subject of sex may have had as much shock value (and audience draw) in Shakespeare’s day as it does in our own. This post’s title words are from Hamlet, and if we put them in context, we find Hamlet being rude to Ophelia, while on the verge of watching a little play about a death:

Ham. Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
Oph. No, my lord.
Ham. I mean, my head upon your lap.
Oph. Ay, my lord.
Ham. Do you think I meant country matters?
Oph. I think nothing, my lord.
Ham. That’s a fair thought to lie between a maid’s legs.
Oph. What is, my lord?
Ham. Nothing.

(Hamlet 3.2.110-9)

Ophelia’s evasive attempt (all she may be able to do under the circumstances) at thinking nothing appears to backfire. Hamlet’s undercurrent of incandescent rage ignites and he misogynistically redoubles her words back at her. I can hear some readers thinking. “Undercurrent of incandescent rage? In Hamlet? Really? Well, you wouldn’t have to play it like that.” Some may think not.

Yet, Hamlet remains a play rooted in vengeance, part of the early modern theatrical genre of plays depicting revenge and retribution. Of course, this stems from much older traditional ideas of violence and reprisal that have followed us through human history, spanning cultural and geographical boundaries. In the early 18th century, forty seven samurai, left metaphorically homeless after their master is unjustly forced to commit seppuku (ritual suicide), wander the countryside, becoming rōnin, seeking to avenge their daimyo. The account of Chushingura remains a suspenseful read, the rōnin plotting their revenge for an entire year before carrying it out, in spite of the prohibition against their act. Their tireless loyalty to their master remains the stuff of legend, relating loosely to the history of actual samurai retained by Asano Takumi-no-Kami Naganori, who died in 1701.

Revenge stories remain with us, of course, part of the cultural vernacular that is often woven into action films, spy thrillers, and the ubiquitous western:

General revenge motifs aside, such plays, films, and even television series tend to be about a kind of righteous anger. A standoff–with some variant of good (or potentially redeemable) against the bad. Yet, does Ophelia really do anything to warrant Hamlet’s targeting? Not that the audience sees, and any argument to the contrary seems thin. No matter how angry Hamlet may be that Ophelia’s father and Claudius force her to spy on him, such manipulations lie beyond her will. She is often held up as a character example of a woman oppressed by the men around her. The particular barbs that Hamlet flings at Ophelia serve in a secondary way to heighten the angry tone of the revenge play, but they also pointedly betray his sexual fascination with her, and her responses are often perceived as self defense, parrying his words and then attempting to mark them as levity in order to preserve herself.

Some suggest that this may be a way that the Hamlet and Ophelia may relate to each other, which seems monstrous to many, in spite of the fact that Hamlet itself sometimes seems to be a catalogue of oddity in human relationships, parading the peculiarities of human contact before us in a grotesque pageant. Perhaps the society of Elsinore had been intended to reflect historical court personalities in a roundabout way–the play’s misogyny reflecting a casual culture of abuse that appears not to have changed in centuries (if it ever has at all). The bits of song that Ophelia later sings in madness suggest, either literally or metaphorically, that Hamlet may have ‘grabbed by her country matters’, and perhaps others have have done so too. It certainly could be played that way.

That Hamlet’s father’s death unhinges the prince’s secret contemplation of the future, causing him to rebel against life, embracing death and sneering at anything that might hint at generation or renewal does not excuse his behaviour. Yet, it is as though death infects him as he makes contact with his father’s ghost. This taints his very being, spoiling life, soul, and love in the process. As Hamlet says:

So, oft it chances in particular men
That for some vicious mole of nature in them,
As in their birth, wherein they are not guilty
(Since nature cannot choose his origin),
By their o’ergrowth of some complexion,
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,
Or by some habit, that too much o’erleavens
The form of plausive manners–that these men,
Being Nature’s livery or Fortune’s star,
His virtues else, be they as pure as grace,
As infinite as man may undergo,
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault.

(Hamlet 1.4.23-36)

Initially, Hamlet ruminates about corruption until his father’s ghost brings death onto the stage, and murder into his son’s thinking. Yet, here we are, back to the subject of death again, and if the erotic or the sexual may lead us here so quickly, then how can we separate them? How can we conceive of the sexual apart from death when the early modern slang for orgasm was “dying”. Perhaps we cannot. At least not completely. Bataille argues that “The final aim of ertocism is fusion, all barriers gone”*, and he points out that, in order to reach this borderless state, the erotic first passes through a state of objectification.

Gustave Courbet’s famous painting “L’Origine du Monde in the Musée d’Orsay suggests this. A simple Google search of the painting’s name will bring you to the image which my server support service has asked that I not post here. (Yes, I asked about famous painting images, but the default in the United States seems to sustain a particular strain of Puritan moral standard, often at some expense to the free speech/expression to which so much lip service is often paid.) The title, “The Origin of the World, offers us the vulva depicted in Courbet’s painting as the source of the world, the generative font of the universe (which from a human perspective, in many senses, it is).

As much as he publicly affronts Ophelia, Hamlet seems to confront the very idea of this source as much as he does Ophelia’s character. Having figuratively joined death, having sworn to follow the ghost, Hamlet is compelled to reject the living world. He turns away from the mundus, from the great globe itself, from the sphere of the cosmos, and from any life or wellspring that might bring renewal or regeneration. Hamlet’s quest focuses on destruction and obliteration, so he must turn away from Ophelia, and (when the ghost orders him to do so) from his mother as well. The origin of the world is no longer his terrain, and that his rejection of it becomes violent marks his further commitment to his destructive path.

Love and sexual attraction are not always this way, of course, but they can often be so. So much pain and suffering is wrapped up in love, in that part of human experience that encompasses connection, for that is where our weakness lies. We become vulnerable to others when we connect with them (even as enemies) because in any connection we acknowledge another’s power over us, however small that power may be. We become participants with them and in them. We become intimate, promiscuous even, with some portion of their experience as it becomes mutual with our own. Even in momentary recognition of another in the street involves the loss of some small fragment of the independent self. For a fraction of a second, “I” becomes “we”, with this taking as many forms as there are kinds of human relations. Naturally, the potential loss of the individual may be amplified in cases of emotional or sexual relationships, as it tends to intensify increasingly over prolonged periods of time.

Issues of vulnerability and privacy, the risk of loss of individuation, may make the idea of sexual relations seem like a vehicle on the edge of careening out of control. Here is an audio clip of Wilson Pickett’s famous version of Mack Rice’s song:

In both the song and Hamlet’s dialogue, a male figure speaks in a way that objectifies female sexuality and genitalia, and men often tend to pursue sexual gratification in terms of objectification. The dialogue at the beginning of this post seems to have much more to do with Hamlet’s mustang than with anything else. As Ophelia sings in her madness:

Young men will do ’t, if they come to ’t.  
By Cock, they are to blame. 
Quoth she, “Before you tumbled me,  
You promised me to wed.”
He answers,
“So would I ha’ done, by yonder sun, 
An thou hadst not come to my bed.”

(Hamlet 4.5.60-6)

At some point, a critical work on criticism itself might be in order because it is striking how finicky academics may be, even sometimes glossing “country matters” as being a term for ‘sexual relations’. It may be, but Hamlet’s meaning is clearer here. He jests at c(o)unt-ry matters, at ladies’ laps, making some ado about the “No-thing” that might be located there (nothing or no-thing being an early modern slang term for the vagina that serves as an off colour pun in the title of another of Shakespeare’s well known plays).

Yet, it may be that language fails us too, as we move figuratively from boardroom to bedroom, our language becomes intimate with both arousal and derision. In her book, The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History, Emma Rees notes, “I end The Vagina by pleading for ‘a word for it’ and, since language is how we interact with the world, it’s language that we need in order to effect change.”** Ophelia’s lament voices the common complaint, that the maiden seeks marriage while the man seeks only what he has objectified. Men may only want one thing, or they may want more. Very telling that, in Ophelia’s newly dug grave, Hamlet grapples with Laertes about love, saying “I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers/Could not with all their quantity of love/Make up my sum.” (H 4.5.264-6)*** Love remains a mystery here too, pointedly abiding on death’s margins, but love may also be distinct from sexual attraction, no matter how intertwined they may be in many cases.

Sexual desire seems less complicated, and even when following a ghost’s prescription leading to death (whether the revenger’s, the object of his revenge, or both), desire may suddenly appear before us. It may loom in the landscape of our consciousness, perhaps occupying a seat at a play that we have designed as a moral trap for our dissolute uncle. Our unruly minds may be full of actors and murder in one moment, and preoccupied with country matters in the next. John Wellington Wells may never really “melt [our] rich uncle in wax”****–or, at least, not the way we think he will. Requests for love philtre always seem to be getting in the way. Such is life.

Batailles may be correct that love itself stems from some kind of initial erotic spark or impulse–however sublimated that may be. Yet, to be fair, there are many kinds of love, and the asexual person will tend to need as much affection and companionship as Mustang Sally. Human affection and attraction has so many permutations that they would be difficult to catalogue. Petrarch’s glimpse of Laura in that Avignon church in the early 1300s may have ignited not only a never consummated passion, but also perhaps the humanist way of thinking. It seems to have precipitated a turning in the ship of human thought.

Even when driven by desire, lovers have often been star crossed, their mustangs parked or sidelined while they walk in the rain. The 12th century history of Abelard and Heloise, who were forced apart after Heloise became pregnant, is hardly unique. The Persian poet Nizami’s epic, The Story of Layla & Majnun,***** tells of 7th century lovers parted after their initial connection had been made. Much as their story encompasses great pain and even madness, there is a kind of reconciliation in the way that the lovers come to embody a completeness, becoming a greater whole even in their separateness and their individual solitude. Majnun’s final words become a prayer to his maker, but also to Layla. “You, my love. . .”, he says in the end. In this last breath, the Maker is combined with ‘my love’, in a way that makes them seem undifferentiated. After that utterance, there is nothing more to say. His words mark his full fusion, as breath, God, and his love become one unified expression of the universe in a single moment.

Many of the world’s great religious traditions, especially those in the Far East, acknowledge the essential generative aspects of the feminine. The Taoist text, the Tao Te Ching, is often attributed to a mysterious elder sage called Laozi (the old one), who is often thought to have lived around the 6th century bce, if he lived at all. Nevertheless, here is a translation of what is generally accepted to be chapter 6 from that text:

The life-force of the valley never dies–
This is called the dark female.
The gateway of the dark female–
This is called the root of the world.
Wispy and delicate, it only seems to be there,
Yet its productivity is bottomless.******

We may all be mystics, capable of such luminous leaps, but the frequent, common tragedies of human life do not always allow us enough room to make transcendent leaps. Like Hamlet, like Ophelia, we feel angry, hurt, and bewildered when people leave us. When beset by tragedy, or confronted by loss in any of its guises, we mourn in ways that, however small, are often transformative in some way too.

Even if we remain behind for a time, like Rengetsu,******* death hounds us into the very hollows of our lives. Yet, even in her retreat from the noisy dust of samsara, in her seclusion from the human world, Rengetsu meditates on regeneration:

Spring Wind

Eternal spring wind,
I know you won’t be too rough,
On the delicate
Branches and buds,
Of the weeping willow.

Weaving. Precarious new life, buds and branches, stemming from the still weeping willow against the fabric of the perennial wind. This senses the fabric of which we all are a part. Our origin, Hamlet and Ophelia’s nothing, the fair thought brings us here, where life continues to bud and branch in a constant remaking of itself.

Fertility, in thought, in love, in life, may become a struggle, but however violently we may strive against it, it remains an essential element of being for many of us. Even Hamlet, as much as he strives against it, speaks of the sexual with Ophelia when he sees her. Of all the fruit on the tree of life, our own sexuality often seems to be, for many people, the most compelling. As the well known poem by the great Vietnamese poetess, Hồ Xuân Hương (1772-1822) says:

My body is like the jackfruit on the branch:
My skin is coarse, my meat is thick.

Kind sir, if you love me, pierce me with your stick.
Caress me and sap will slicken your hands.

“Jackfruit” by Hồ Xuân Hương********

We tend to quicken at such thoughts, even involuntarily, and this may be part of a grander design. For as either the Bible or western novelist Louis L’Amour might remind us, it may well be better to be quick than dead, although the two states are never so far apart.

*Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death & Sensuality. Translated by Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986, p. 134 then p. 129.

**Rees, Emma L. E. The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History. New York: Bloomsbury Academic an Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017, Loc 163.

***There is some variance in this stage direction. Harold Jenkins notes about “grappling with him” that “Q1 has the direction ‘Hamle leapes in after Leartes’. This and the Elegy on Burbage (‘Of have I seen him leap into the grave’) are evidence of what was done in performance. But Granville-Barker (Prefaces, iii.162-3n.) argues that the action requires Laertes, the aggressor, to come out of the grave rather than Hamlet to leap in. Moreover, attendants must be able to part them. Neither the text nore the pattern of the action assists those who would find here a symbolic burial and resurrection.” Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by Harold Jenkins. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Thomson, 2005, p. 391, note 252.

****From the operetta, The Sorcerer. Sullivan, Arthur, and W. S. Gilbert. The Authentic Gilbert and Sullivan Songbook: 92 Unabridged Selections from All 14 Operas, Reproduced from Early Vocal Scores. Compiled by Malcolm Binney and Peter Lavender. Edited by James Spero. New York: Dover Publications, 1977.

*****Nizami. The Story of Layla & Majnun. Translated by Rudolph Gelpke, Zia Inayat Khan, and Omid Safi. New Lebanon, NY: Omega Publications, 2011.

******Laozi.  Daodejing “Making This Life Significant”: A Philosophical Translation. Translated by Roger L. Ames and David Undefined Hall. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003, p. 85. The original text:
谷神不死，是謂玄牝。
玄牝之門，是謂天地根。
綿綿若存，用之不勤。
From the section most often designated Chapter 6, please note that “dark” in this case does not have the same kinds of connotations that it might have in a text written in English. Rather, it suggests a kind of dark that might help define the light by its presence, something participatory instead of negative or exclusive.

*******The Rengetsu, was Otagaki Nobu (1791-1875). Having outlived two husbands, three children, she took orders as a Buddhist nun at the age of 33. By the time she was 45, her two other children and her beloved adoptive father had also died. Her luminous poetry reminds us of the ways in which even terrible tragedies may be transformed into beauty. This translation of “Spring Wind” is from: Rengetsu. Lotus Moon: The Poetry of Rengetsu. Translated by John Stevens. Buffalo: White Pine Press, 2015.

********Hồ, Xuân Hương. Spring Essence: The Poetry of Hồ Xuân Hương. Translated by John Balaban. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2000, p. 37

We are in the theatre. In this case, it is a small but somewhat elegant space, meticulously constructed by hand in a barn on a semi rural property. The day has been hot, almost stifling, and four actors are on the stage, going through the final rounds of callbacks. The director won’t begin to tell them how impressed he is, how grateful for their work, their talent, and their dedication. He won’t say any of this now, partly because there will be time for that later, and partly because the handful of people in the theatre are in this moment deep into the landscape of what might be termed “real theatre”–the theatre made up of sweating, crying, whispering, straining, relaxing, staunchly upholding, and collapsing into the movement and the text. This is the bones of plot, character, story. It is a part of that joss for which this small, hot structure was originally built. Blood flowing on the stage, and in the theatre’s veins. The moment is alive.

The actors are working part of a scene from Macbeth, the moment where Ross arrives to tell MacDuff that the latter’s family has been brutally slaughtered by murderers that Macbeth (who has, at this point become a tyrant king of Scotland) had sent in order to kill MacDuff himself. MacDuff had thought that he had left his family safely at home, and he blinks uncomprehendingly at this devastating news.

Like many of us, especially when we hear something that knocks our sun out of the sky, MacDuff feels that he must be mistaken, that he must have heard Ross’s words incorrectly. He asks repeatedly, unable to comprehend what he has heard:

ROSS 
Your castle is surprised, your wife and babes
Savagely slaughtered. To relate the manner
Were on the quarry of these murdered deer
To add the death of you.

MALCOLM Merciful heaven!—
What, man, ne’er pull your hat upon your brows.
Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak
Whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break.

MACDUFF My children too?

ROSS 
Wife, children, servants, all that could be found.

MACDUFF 
And I must be from thence? My wife killed too?

ROSS I have said.

MALCOLM Be comforted.
Let’s make us med’cines of our great revenge
To cure this deadly grief.

MACDUFF 
He has no children. All my pretty ones?
Did you say “all”? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?

MALCOLM Dispute it like a man.

MACDUFF I shall do so,
But I must also feel it as a man.
I cannot but remember such things were
That were most precious to me. Did heaven look on
And would not take their part? Sinful Macduff,
They were all struck for thee! Naught that I am,
Not for their own demerits, but for mine,
Fell slaughter on their souls. Heaven rest them now.

MALCOLM 
Be this the whetstone of your sword. Let grief
Convert to anger. Blunt not the heart; enrage it.

MACDUFF 
O, I could play the woman with mine eyes
And braggart with my tongue! But, gentle heavens,
Cut short all intermission! Front to front
Bring thou this fiend of Scotland and myself.
Within my sword’s length set him. If he ’scape,
Heaven forgive him too.

(Macbeth 4.3.240-75)

A heartbreaking scene, in no small part because it so accurately renders how tragedy may break and remold us. How even the boldest of us stagger under the crushing load of our deepest griefs. Like Lear’s “Never, never, never, never, never” at the loss of his daughter, Cordelia, sometimes cited as Shakespeare’s bleakest single line, MacDuff’s loss reminds us of our own losses, no matter how removed by variance of circumstance.

In this case, in our stuffy little theatre, the actors run through the moment several times, each connecting with their own innate sense of performing loss (of loss itself) until the small audience of production staff are all sniffling slightly while tears light the corners of their eyes. And there it is. That’s the ‘stuff’, the magic. That’s the true pitch and moment of theatre–bringing moments of human joy and grief, staggering and surety to an audience. Making them know it too.

That theatre sometimes fails to do this is a peculiar thing as well, occasionally running to the proverbial luke warm. Sounds of no hands clapping. Bewildering the hand running over emptiness instead of the rough texture and snag that delineates life’s growing living wood. Seldom, if ever, is it the actors’ fault when live theatre falls down. Neither can it be pinned on the director (and certainly not the more technical staff, who spend their own time sweating out hanging instruments and programming sound equipment to show the performers at their very best). More often, it is our collective vision, our own engagement with our lives, removed from ourselves by electronic filters and misdirections.

The arts removed from schools, the music, drama, visual arts taken from our next generations under the guise of budgetary constraint, of needing money for the Pentagon instead of those who might next lead the world. No news reports this. No financial papers cite the incredible cost to human life and understanding that it takes when the arts are murdered, and their cultural contributions to our collective being spirited away to be buried in dark ravines by murderers as dark as any in Macbeth.

Our corrupted King of Scotland is more than a villainous president or a thug prime minister. Our corrupted King is a social acquiescence to greed. For in spite of what Gordon Gekko told us in Wall Street, greed is not good. It robs us from our better selves to set us in pursuit of something else–of dollars, pounds, or euros, or of any currency that may be ‘current’. As Cutler Beckett tells Elizabeth Swan:

. . .loyalty is no longer the currency of the realm as your father believes.
. . .
I’m afraid currency is the currency of the realm.

(Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. By Ted Elliott and
Terry Rossio. Dir. Gore Verbinski. With Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Stellan Skarsgård, Bill Nighy, Jack Davenport, Kevin R. McNally,
Jonathan Pryce. Walt Disney, 2006.)

We are our own bleeding Scotland, bleeding to death in the heat of small theatres, in the withering fields with the sound of locusts already turning their slightly fading trill towards autumn. Fewer crickets in the tall blonded grass. Leaves deepened into that green that presages falling. We fall into a deeper and deeper summer sleep. Extended fire seasons keeping us restless. World’s water supplies vanishing for many. Seas rising. Islands changing, going away.

What will the politicians of today tell their grandchildren? Will they “play the woman” with their own eyes then, when they see the young ones suffer? Still time though, right? Still time to turn this ship around. Edmund Fitzgerald driving on across Lake Superior in November. As the BBC reports, we have a decade or so. Or not. It appears that it may be a good deal shorter than that, whatever others spout:

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48964736

Oh, and in other news the compelling actor Rutger Hauer died. Well, perhaps that’s lucky for him.

Sorry, kids. Had no idea. I thought Capitalism or some similar ideal might save us. I voted such and such a way. Had no idea that it would get this hot. I thought we had time. Oh, well. At least we didn’t succumb to the evils of socialism (which is just like old style Soviet communism, isn’t it). Thank heavens for that!

Is this a dagger which I see before me? The handle towards my hand? Macbeth’s own destruction is rolled part and parcel into the destructive nature of the act he contemplates–an act based on personal gain, on ambition. The two cannot be separated. To commit to the destructive path commits one to one’s own eventual destruction. Once ignited, conflagrations consume everything.

From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. Prescient words indeed, Mr. Frost. That limitless hunger of desire has brought us here, to the edge of the volcano. But our ‘precious’ has become ourselves, melted into the fabric of us, and we can no longer destroy that terrible ring without destroying ourselves as well.

Our actors still play their parts, their beacon fires ignited on small, vanishing stages that have been supplanted by vast forests of glowing screens. “If you don’t like it, you can always leave,” we are told. Leave and go where? Where would have us even if the world weren’t vanishing beneath a tide of accelerated heat. Think this summer’s hot? Think the storms were bad this winter? Wait until next year. No. Really. Wait.

What will the crickets do? Will summer still end for them as it does today? Will they chew clothes in abandoned closets into rags? Will they eat us down to our roasted bones? Will our cars and huge pickup trucks rust away to nothing in fields grown over with our untenanted legacies? Will the world slowly cool again once we are gone?

Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-browed night,
Give me my Romeo. And when I shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.

(Romeo and Juliet 3.2.19-25)

Photographer/ethnographer, Edward S. Curtis, who was famous for photographing Native Americans (not always accurately, to be fair, for he needed to make a living too, albeit his concern seemed genuine). He called this picture (of riding Diné or Navajo) “The Vanishing Race”:

Although he was thinking of Native Americans, how much this photo now seems to reflect us all.

In the end, perhaps the opening photo, the one with no people on the road, will be most accurate. The lack of academic or artistic jobs will hardly matter then, as perhaps it hardly matters now. For the most part, it seems we have already stopped thinking. Now, we are screaming. Quietly just yet, but soon that caterwauling may prevail, thundering earth and skies with wanton grief at visions of graves on graves, while the larger Scotland that is our world sinks into seas of our own making.

Our artistic vision, and the engagement with our world that stems from that, evaporates like the arts in our schools. Perhaps Betsy Devos bookends to the myth of Betsy Ross. First flag to last flag of the Republic. Like these photos. People on the road to empty road. Like our imagination, our too too sullied flesh, our aesthetic and our broader understanding fading under the brunt of our stunning progress. Riding down a road into the distant hills, disengagement lighting the way to dusty death.

For who will set our memory into little stars to pin it in the vagrant sky? Will we simply be like all MacDuff’s “pretty chickens and their dam”? Gone in a gasping roasting moment, heaving our last into a furnace world that burns us all in spite of whatever money we may have, ended by murderers we elected and licensed, to end us, our children, and our world? At one fell swoop.

A man fumes in a field, carrying his righteous anger like a weapon with which he hopes to slay another man, a man he believes has wronged him. Somewhat ironically, this angry man is a healer, a physician, and the man with whom he wishes to duel is a parson, a clergyman, a healer of souls. Other men, observers, are in the field as well, watching the situation evolve.

PAGE: Yonder is a most reverend gentleman, who, belike
having received wrong by some person, is at most
odds with his own gravity and patience that ever you
saw.

SHALLOW: I have lived fourscore years and upward; I never
heard a man of his place, gravity and learning, so
wide of his own respect.

SIR HUGH EVANS: What is he?

PAGE: I think you know him; Master Doctor Caius, the
renowned French physician.

SIR HUGH EVANS: Got’s will, and his passion of my heart! I had as
lief you would tell me of a mess of porridge. (MW 3.1.49-59)*

Both of the potential combatants are of foreign descent. Doctor Caius is French, and Sir Hugh Evans is Welsh (Wales having its own distinct cultural identity even today–in spite of being a political and economic part of the United Kingdom). Although both men may have a high level of education, their accents make them vulnerable to the atypical pronunciation of English words–often in ways that sound comical to the native English speakers around them, and also to the play’s audience. In productions of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Doctor Caius and Sir Hugh Evans tend to be always played for a laugh–perhaps reflecting Commedia dell’Arte origins, where aliens virtually always displayed heightened ‘differences’ for comic effect. In addition, Shakespeare frequently leaned on comic conventions of his time, and mocking the Welsh accent is only one example of the casual prejudice that may have been part of the early modern social landscape of his time, just as some characters tend to be ridiculed frequently in modern motion pictures and television (characters who are older, mentally aberrant, or overweight, for example).

Yet, the proverbial street seldom runs only one way. In Henry V, Captain Fluellen’s Welsh pronunciation and his tendency to pontificate do not detract from his serious and relatively admirable dedication to duty and honour. When Pistol ridicules the Welshman for wearing a leek in his hat on St. David’s Day, Fluellen subsequently catches him and beats him, making the hapless Pistol eat a leek raw. The episode’s cautionary note comes from Gower, who watches the scene while saying to Pistol, “You thought, because he could not speak English in the native garb, he could not therefore handle an English cudgel: you find it otherwise; and henceforth let a Welsh correction teach you a good English condition.” (Henry V 5.1.82-3) Again, Shakespeare seems to experiment with form, expanding the stock comical foreigner until the character encompasses a less conventional wholeness, fleshing out the character until Fluellen becomes more like a human being, and more a reflection of actual human experience, than he is a mere convention on a page.

What about the Merchant of Venice? Well, that may well be a subject for another post, but suffice it to say that (as is often pointed out) the final repeated goading and jeering of the Christian characters offers a dramatic portrait of them that looks little better than the Jewish character Shylock’s infamous insistence on his “pound of flesh” in payment for Antonio’s forfeited bond. The audience is also reminded that Shylock had been reluctant to make the loan in the first place, because Antonio had insulted him, spitting on him and kicking him in public.

The question arises in the play about where such wrongs begin and where they end. When wrongs give birth to other wrongs, perpetuating the violent cycle entails becoming intimately participatory with the ongoing violence, supporting a cycle rather than ending it.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his Nobel lecture in 1964, said:

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert.

Violence and abuse may be verbal (written or oral) as well as physical. Bigotry or prejudice in speech may be as much or even more violent than that rendered by a beating. Certainly intolerance, in mind, emotion, or in spirit, is the wellspring of so many evils in the world. How sad then, and how tragic, when we hear words of prejudice come from the mouths of supposed leaders, those who are supposed to set examples, who are supposed to lead us all to greater things.

Dale Carnegie said, “God Himself, sir, does not propose to judge a man until his life is over. Why should you and I?”**

We seem to be enlightened in some ways, and yet we remain woefully ignorant in others. Prejudice persists as does (thank goodness) the resistance to its insidious influence. Bruce Hornsby painted it in music:

Perhaps, in the end, we might be better off if we listened more to philosophers than we do to leaders. Leaders tend to have too many agendas while philosophers simply tend to try to make sense of things. Philosophers tend to begin from a place of knowledge (or at least a place where they seek a genuine understanding of a subject). Leaders, politicians, seem to frequently begin from a place of little true knowledge, using rhetoric as an influential tool rather than as an explanatory one.

We are always cautioned about the times when people begin banning and/or burning books, and we are cautioned against the people who would censor or silence others, especially when such censorship or silencing might be couched in populist rhetoric that repeatedly plucks emotional strings by bandying about charged language, using terms like ‘God’, ‘great’, and ‘nation’. Such rhetoric is so often the magician’s waving scarf, the flash of smoke that distracts from the true agenda of the trick proceeding smoothly while the audience remains distracted.

It may seem a cliché, but it is still true that we are all audiences really, and all actors on the “great stage of fools”. Ghosts are like crows, seeking the shiny bauble of a rapidly passing afternoon. Fading in and out of our conscious and focused existence. Easily distracted or mislead by flashes of momentary beauty, or the lightning of passing events. And sometimes we all need to take time off as well. We may need to watch the third season of Stranger Things, or catch up on watching whatever of that other series we haven’t quite finished. We can’t be so focused all the time. Who could stand it? Even Descartes admitted (in a letter to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia) that he couldn’t think that way all the time.

Yet, it is important to pay attention. Listen to the language leaders use, the words they choose to convey what they say. Opinion takes funny forms, but so does rhetoric that proposes to downplay or dismiss evidence or facts. This is how we lose understanding, by missing the forest for the trees, or the speech for the words–missing the real agenda for the seductive spin.

It remains all too easy to follow the wrong path in the woods. As Huckleberry Finn says, “That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it.”*** Seems an awful lot like politics today, often taking anyone, observer, proponent, but mostly the politicians themselves ‘so wide of [their] own respect’.

*Shakespeare, William. The Merry Wives of Windsor. Edited by Giorgio Melchiori. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, an Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2014.

**Although the line is sometimes attributed to Samuel Johnson, it may have really been Carnegie. The line appears at the end of the first chapter of Carnegie’s 1936 book, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

***from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (the pen name of Samuel Clemens). Often called ‘the great American novel’, it was first published in the U.K. in 1884, and was published in the United States the following year.

(A note: The ghost has it on good authority that the Malone Society will be meeting on the 6th of July at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford upon Avon in the United Kingdom. Anyone who can make it to this event should go because the meeting will feature a talk by the extremely knowledgeable Martin Wiggins on Philip Massinger’s play The Roman Actor, followed by a rare performance of that play, and then papers by scholars and questions with the actors. A real treat for anyone who can be there.)

For many people, one of the most terrible fears about dying isn’t actually the end of life itself. Instead, it is the fear that they, their achievements, or their lives, may be forgotten. Even those who have large families, many friends, colleagues, and connections may fear that their work, their efforts, and all the facets of their lives may eventually be completely erased from what Prospero calls “the dark backward and abysm of time”, and that they may vanish from individual or collective memory.

In this respect, there may be much to fear, for we all sense that someday, perhaps in a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand years, all our memories and connections will be so much sand–the dust to which the Bible tells us we must return. Ashes and dust. Dust in the wind. Diamonds and rust. Fading, dissolving, no remaining. Our once central (at least to us) existence consigned to wind across an empty field.

The last line of Shakespeare’s sonnet 18 in the title of this post represents one way that Shakespeare addressed this. Preserving not a treasured individual, but at least the memory of that individual’s youth or youthful vitality in verse–recorded in a poem that may outlast the individual long after they are bones, perhaps for even more than four hundred years. It is one way, albeit imperfect, of transcending mortality. In failing to make the subject endure, we may, at least, render the memory of that subject somehow more permanent.

In this sense, words become sorcery, capturing memory and etching it into standing stone. Of course, stone wears away too, eventually, a fact to which anyone who has spent time in ancient graveyards may attest. Ruthless time’s destructive umbrella eventually draws shade over all we know, or burns away in relentless sun.

Yet, some literary passages do survive for a time, many of these being poems and/or plays. Sometimes even short sections of documents take on a life of their own, subsequently achieving a longer kind of half life or quasi immortality. One such example comes from Philip Massinger (1583-1640), whose literary reputation seems to have perched somewhere between mortality and immortality.

According to Martin White, Massinger probably wrote around fifty five plays. Of these, twenty two are lost, eighteen were written with others, and fifteen were probably written by Massinger alone.* Perhaps the finest of these (as judged by Massinger himself and others) was his tragedy, The Roman Actor, first licensed for performance in October of 1626 and staged by the King’s Men at Blackfriars later that year. Afterwards, although the play was apparently occasionally performed, it seems to have gradually fallen out of favour with the general public along with Massinger’s reputation as a playwright, which may have declined for various reasons. Although the general fading may be due to Massinger’s less stirring poetry, or to his sometimes complicated fusion of elements from different genres.

In spite of this, and in spite of the possible retreat of The Roman Actor in general, one part of the play seems to have been retained and performed on its in later days. Gibson notes that John Philip Kemble edited The Roman Actor down to a shorter version, and also retained Paris’s ‘defence of acting’ speech from Act I as a “dramatic showpiece”.**

Because they can be both clever and moving, skillfully acknowledging the artistic medium even while moving through it, metatheatrical pieces tend to be popular anyway. Many of Shakespeare’s plays have smaller playlets or dramatic moments within them that highlight the theatrical nature of the larger play while creating effective micro theatrical moments of their own. The Pyramus and Thisbe scene in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the mousetrap Murder of Gonzago in Hamlet are two well known examples, but Puck’s closing monologue in Dream also underscores the playhouse as a creative structure while pointedly indicating the theatrical nature of much of human experience both within and outside of the theatre itself.

Still, Massinger’s play, The Roman Actor, features a moment where a famous Roman actor must defend the profession of acting itself against the old accusation of distortion. Brought before the lictors (charging officers), Paris is accused by Aretinus:

In thee, as being the chief of thy profession,
I do accuse the quality of treason,
As libellers against the state and Caesar.

(The Roman Actor 1.3.32-4)

When Paris presses him, Aretinus continues:

You are they
That search into the secrets of the time,
And under feigned names on the stage present
Actions not to be touched at, and traduce
Persons of rank and quality of both sexes,
And with satirical and bitter jests
Make even the senators ridiculous
To the plebeians.

(1.3.36-43)

The accusation of a particularly insidious kind of sedition also hints at Plato’s complaint that the arts are so far removed from the actual truth (because they only represent actual truths that lie outside of any fictional portrayal), that they must be excluded from the ideal state.

Here is a portion of Paris’s response:

But ’tis urged
That we corrupt youth and traduce superiors.
When do we bring a vice upon the stage
That does go off unpunished? Do we teach,
By the success of wicked undertakings,
Others to tread in their forbidden steps?
We show no arts of Lydian pandarism,
Corinthian poisons, Persian flatteries,
But mulcted so in the conclusions that
Even those spectators that were so inclined
Go home changed men. And for traducing such
That are above us, publishing to the world
Their secret crimes, we are as innocent
As such as are born dumb. When we present
An heir that does conspire against the life
Of his dear parent, numb’ring every hour
He lives as tedious to him, if there be
Among the auditors one whose conscience tells him
He is of the same mould, we cannot help it.
Or, bringing on the stage a loose adult’ress,
That does maintain the riotous expense
Of him that seeds her greedy lust, yet suffers
The lawful pledges of a former bed
To starve the while for hunger, if a matron,
However great in fortune, birth or titles,
Guilty of such a foul unnatural sin,
Cry out, ”Tis writ by me’, we cannot help it.
Or, when a covetous man’s expressed, whose wealth
Arithmetic cannot number and whose lordships
A falcon in one day cannot fly over,
Yt, he so sordid in his mind, so griping
As not to afford himself the necessaries
To maintain life, if a patrician
(Though honoured with a consulship) find himself
Touched to the quick in this, we cannot help it.
Or when we show a judge that is corrupt,
And will give up his sentence as he favours
The person, not the cause, saving the guilty
If of his faction, and as oft condemning
The innocent out of particular spleen,
If any in this reverend assembly –
Nay, e’en yourself, my lord, that are the image
Of absent Caesar – feel something in your bosom
That puts you in remembrance of things past
Or things intended, ’tis not in us to help it.
I have said, my lord; and now, as you find cause,
Or censure us or free us with applause.

(1.3.96-142)

Indeed, an actor might argue so today, that it isn’t the actor’s fault if his or her art affects individuals (especially guilty ones) in adverse ways.

Still, in the instance of this post, thinking back to the idea of immortality, the interesting thing remains how the above passage seems to have lived on beyond the popularity of the play in which it first appeared. In literature, and in drama, relative longevity may assume many forms. The spring of immortality may bubble forth in a grove of Florida woods .*** Or, a play itself may be immortal, or an idea or a passage within it may become relatively so.

Of course, these things only seem immortal as they may relate to us. Shakespeare and his contemporaries wrote their works around four hundred years ago, but somewhere, if we listen carefully, we can hear echoes from much further back. Echoes of Neanderthal or Denisovan laughter that may sound strange but still familiar to our ears. Even nearer to us, perhaps the Etruscans would be joining such a feast, and maybe even some lost Banquo would this time make his appointed place at table.

*Massinger, Philip. The Roman Actor: A Tragedy. Edited by Martin White. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012, 6.

**Gibson, Colin, ed. The Selected Plays of Philip Massinger. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978, 98.

***Babbit, Natalie. Tuck Everlasting. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975. The wood is later paved over to build a shopping mall, effectively eliminating the spring of immortality.

We’re going to go down these stairs. Although we’ve had a fair amount of feasting during these holidays, and although it is some way down, let’s keep going. Watch your step, please, because it is dark down here. Now, down this hallway. It’s just a little way up ahead, after we go quietly through this door. Shhhh. Listen. Can you hear them? Talking?

A man seems to be pleading with someone. Can you see that man up ahead? Dressed in parson’s robes? Except, if you notice, beneath those robes, he seems to be wearing the multi-coloured clothes of a jester. Yes. Look at his leg as he moves. Look at that boot. Definitely a jester, dressed as a clergyman. But what is he doing?

This jester/parson seems to be arguing with another man, and tormenting him. We can’t see this second man, who seems to be confined beneath that trap door. We can hear Malvolio’s voice though, pleading to be let out of his confinement.

MALVOLIO

Sir Topas, never was man thus wronged: good Sir
Topas, do not think I am mad: they have laid me
here in hideous darkness.

Clown

Fie, thou dishonest Satan! I call thee by the most
modest terms; for I am one of those gentle ones
that will use the devil himself with courtesy:
sayest thou that house is dark?

MALVOLIO

As hell, Sir Topas.

Clown

Why it hath bay windows transparent as barricadoes,
and the clearstores toward the south north are as
lustrous as ebony; and yet complainest thou of
obstruction?

MALVOLIO

I am not mad, Sir Topas: I say to you, this house is dark.

Clown

Madman, thou errest: I say, there is no darkness
but ignorance; in which thou art more puzzled than
the Egyptians in their fog.

(Twelfth Night 4.2.26-39)

In Twelfth Night, Feste the Fool poses as a parson named Sir Topas in order to torment Malvolio while he is confined for suspected madness. Although Malvolio is not really mad, his sanity is suspected after he has been tricked by some of the household (the carousing Sir Toby and his confederates) into believing that Olivia, who employs Malvolio as a household steward, is secretly in love with him. Known for his bitterly serious, sanctimonious puritanical outlook, Malvolio, does as the fake letter bids him to do, and appears to his employer cross gartered in yellow stockings, grinning a vulpine leer at the secret love that he supposes is between them. The ridiculous spectacle of the incongruously smiling Malvolio showing off his legs in yellow stockings is one of the great comic moments in the play, and perhaps one of the greatest in the dramatic canon. Knowing nothing of the false letter, Olivia believes that her steward has gone mad.

Subsequently, Sir Toby and his accomplices confine Malvolio in a dark room (a treatment often recommended for madness), and he is tormented by Feste, part of which is related in the above dialogue. Of course, Malvolio is literally in the dark, but he is also metaphorically so. Knowing nothing of the trick that has been played on him, he is left frightened and bewildered, and the play often works best when the audience are made to loathe Malvolio in the first part of the play, and then begin to feel sorry for him as they see Feste torment him.

Malvolio’s darkness remains multifold. When the other characters confine him, his ‘darkness’ is not just the literal lack of light where he is confined, but also a darkness of attitude. It is not so much Malvolio’s narrow moral perspective that the others condemn as it is his overbearing attempts to enforce his own idea of morality on others. As steward, he would govern Olivia’s household puritanically, shutting down everything he sees as potentially wicked. To Malvolio, anything that he sees as exceeding his own set of personal moral rules becomes not only debauchery, but also a kind of personal affront. His enormous ego perceives festive celebration as disrespectful: to his employer, to his employer’s household, and most of all to him as the principal officer of household management.

Not that Feste tortures Malvolio without reason. As the self established representation of persistent sober morality, Malvolio remains diametrically opposed to almost everything for which the jester stands. Feste lives by means of wit and humour, which he uses to illustrate points and promote a broader perspective, even in those who become targets of his joking. As ironic as it may seem, the fool takes his jesting seriously, dedicating himself to broadening and deepening others’ perspectives where he can. Malvolio’s more constricted outlook, on the other hand, suggests living life in absolute terms, with one’s behaviour governed by a strict set of rules derived from moral correctness. He not only disapproves of the fool, but he also belittles Feste’s work.

Malvolio is not really nearly as virtuous as he believes himself to be. He suffers from the same malady displayed by many other characters in the play. As his employer, Olivia, tells him, “Oh, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a distempered appetite.“(1.5.80-1) He’s not only generally immensely unhappy, but he is also a killjoy, behaving in a way that almost insists that others should be unhappy too.

Like the Duke Orsino, who is more in love with the idea of being a great lover than he is with Olivia (whom he initially pursues romantically), or Olivia herself, who proudly believes her own storied beauty makes her desirable to all men, Malvolio thinks highly of himself, “practicing behaviour to his shadow”, and strutting about the household like a moralistic peacock in constant judgement of those around him. When he begins to believe that Olivia may be in love with him, Malvolio’s thoughts shift quickly from the idea of a romance with her to the idea of being master of the household himself, with the authority to rule the household as he sees fit, forcing others like Sir Toby to bow and scrape to him and his power.

Opposite Malvolio, Sir Toby Belch reels drunkenly and sometimes maliciously through the play while promoting his own brand of self serving debauchery. Belch isn’t an admirable character either (although he can be funny, which sometimes makes him more accessible and more likeable than the ill humoured, unpleasant, and astringent Malvolio). Sir Toby pretends friendship with the hapless Sir Andrew Aguecheek solely for the purposes of maintaining a predatory access to Sir Andrew’s fortune. Yet, Belch is also a relatively clever character, and his analysis is frequently on point. When Malvolio insists that Sir Toby will have to leave his cousin Olivia’s house if his carousing continues, Sir Toby responds:

Art any more than a steward? Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? (2.3.104-6)

Those who seek to remake the world in terms of their own perspective will always come up short, and this caution reverberates through the play, trembling at the core of it. Characteristically, the play also practices its point on the audience too.

As an audience, we laugh at Sir Toby’s jokes only to have our laughing cut short when he coldly dismisses his former companion, Sir Andrew, as “a thin faced knave, a gull.” We laugh at Malvolio’s ridiculous attempt at courting until the cruelty of his confinement in darkness comes home to us. By the time Malvolio exits, with his final line, “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” (in 5.1), even Olivia realises that we are now on the doorstep of a very different kind of play–a sequel that might easily become a revenge tragedy. Duke Orsino sends after Malvolio to seek peace, but the outcome remains unclear.

Earlier in the play, Feste sings a song of death to the Duke Orsino:

Come away, come away, death, 
And in sad cypress let me be laid. 
Fly away, fly away, breath; 
I am slain by a fair cruel maid. 
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,  O, prepare it! 
My part of death, no one so true 
Did share it. 

Not a flower, not a flower sweet, 
On my black coffin let there be strown. 
Not a friend, not a friend greet 
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown. 
A thousand thousand sighs to save, 
Lay me, O, where 
Sad true lover never find my grave, 
To weep there!

(2.4.50-65)

In Twelfth Night, this song, along with the duels where no one is ultimately killed, serves as a festive appeasement of death, paving the way for the play’s proper comic ending. However, the song also reminds us that Malvolio’s ‘mal’ or ‘bad’ perspective arises not just from his character’s emotional truncation, but also from a deep kind of wound, from the very discontent that accompanies so much of the unsatisfied human condition. Malvolio’s dress and manner in attempting to be attractive to Olivia is ridiculous, but it also represents the steward’s honest attempt to transcend the boundaries of his own existence–seeking to discover for himself a terrain based in a love that he may never have known, and for which he lacks all vocabulary or understanding.

In part, we laugh at Malvolio because he lacks the navigational tools that would make him a successful lover. In a play replete with couplings, it is Malvolio and Sir Andrew who seem to exit the stage with no real glimmer of future satisfaction on their horizons. Where Sir Andrew is a sad, even a tragic figure, Malvolio’s exit, vowing revenge, suggests a nascent Iago to Sir Andrew’s disappointed Roderigo. Sir Andrew remains sad and betrayed, but Malvolio exits in a rage that makes him dangerous.

Feste’s final song, about the creation of the world (the festive foundation of comedy) also reminds us of the rain that falls into the human condition every day, and of the everyday theatre of trying to get along with others, of striving to please. Again, the fool bids us to think of human life. Striving to do our best in life remains a condition of our existence, but denying human nature, or attempting to force others to see as we see, or to behave as we may expect them to is not. Cruelty may wreak havoc, but it cannot triumph over human adversity. Really only kindness or love have any chance, ultimately, of doing that:

When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came to man’s estate,
With hey, ho the wind and the rain,
‘Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came, alas! to wive,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came unto my beds,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain.
With toss-pots still had drunken heads,
For the rain it raineth every day.
A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that’s all one, our play is done,
And we’ll strive to please you every day. (5.1.383-402)

No. Are you asking about Shakespeare? Really? Because I thought you might be asking about that essential American poet, Walt Whitman. The poet about whom Ezra Pound said “he is America”.

A tremendously accomplished writer, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass remains one of the defining poetic works of the American voice and a substantial source for understanding the American mind (and perhaps the American soul, whatever that may be). It might be worth noting that Whitman left his formal schooling around the age of 11.

Whitman’s formal education was much less than Shakespeare’s. Yet, as I understand it, one of the arguments against Shakespeare writing his own plays is that he cannot possibly have been learned enough, educated enough to have written such things. Hmmm.

Joseph Conrad, one of the greatest novelists to have written in the English language, didn’t actually learn English until he was 21 years old. Part of the charm, and part of the goods. An outside perspective. A different kind of voice.

What do Whitman or Conrad prove? Nothing. Any argument that attempts to equate some kind of level of formal education with a more sophisticated vision or understanding of the worlds do not hold water. In the relatively short collection of human experience and knowledge, many of our wisest and brightest never went to school, never held an office.

When men came from the Emperor’s court to ask Zhuangzi to come take up a court office, Zhuangzi’s answer was about the tortoise shell on the palace wall. He reasoned that the tortoise might have been happier, better off, and more itself had it been allowed to be a tortoise in the mud. Officious people tend to be offended at Zhuangzi’s dismissal of the officers. “Go away and leave me to fish” seems to offend so many of our ideas of accomplishment, of moving ahead in the world, of contributing. Yet, we all must contribute in our own way as well. Force a great graphic artist to stuff envelopes for a living and you will miss the best of what such an individual might offer to the world.

Force a writer to work on a road crew for a time and the writer may learn much. Make them do it for too long, however, and you will lose the writer. Roses do not bloom forever, gather them while ye may.

Without more evidence, some actual historical evidence that someone else wrote the works of Shakespeare (someone who was not Shakespeare himself), the arguments that currently exist seem to remain houses of cards built on foundations of speculation. (Oh, I know there was that movie, but they do make motion picture fictions out of all sorts of things.) .

Not that the ghost isn’t open to new ideas. Please feel free to show me the evidence. Produce the documents. Show me the money. Then, we might talk, albeit the ghost confesses that the question neither interests nor troubles me so very much. I would rather consider the plays and poems themselves.

So, no. No authorship question here, or if there is one, it may be much more about who we are (individually and collectively) as much as it is about someone who wrote some beautiful work over 400 years ago. And that’s just a note from far festivals, just those kinds of thoughts that tend to be typical for the ghost.

The ghost should be back at the phantom desk this coming week if all goes well. Meantime, stay well out in the world. Be kind. Be safe. Take care of your fellow humans and they will tend to take care of you as well.

(Apologies to those who have already read this piece, which has appeared elsewhere and which is a touch more academic than the typical ghost post. Even ghosts must sometimes haunt other places, however. Sometimes, they even appear at conferences.)

We have just reached that point where latest night bleeds into earliest morning.  A man paces restlessly in a tent in the middle of a military encampment, all his companions long since asleep.  The crucial battle looms ahead of him, and his mind won’t let him rest.  Doubts surround his noblest convictions, threatening to vanquish them.  Thoughts of long-lost friends and lovers are awash in waves of pain and deep regret. 

Tortured by these reflections, the man hears a small sound. Turning, he sees someone standing before him.  One of his dearest friends.  A man whom he helped to assassinate, believing that his friend’s death would be better for the world.

In Act 4, scene 3 of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Julius Caesar’s portentous ghost appears to Brutus.  The ghost foretells Brutus’ final defeat at the hands of Marc Antony’s triumvirate forces in the coming battle at Philippi, but Caesar’s appearance also marks a final solidification, an embodiment of Brutus’ own doubts and guilt. 

We are used to seeing such ominous ghosts in the plays of Shakespeare and in those of his early modern colleagues.  These spectral devices have classical antecedents in Roman tragedy, and they have specific dramatic functions.  Apparitions most often mark pivotal moments in the plot, moments where a lead character’s fortune changes, or moments where the play’s tone or the plot direction is about to change in some significant way.  Yet, ghosts can also perform expository and narrative functions.  In Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, the ghost of the Spanish officer, Andrea, consorts with the embodied persona of Revenge to serve as a kind of chorus, offering a simultaneous commentary and directional indication for the play.  In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which was perhaps written 15 to almost 20 years after Kyd’s influential drama, the ghost of prince Hamlet’s father becomes, in a sense, a coalescence of memory and revenge in a single figure.  Old Hamlet’s ghost is a manifestation of a kingdom ill at ease, of the dis-ease within the state, a personification of the way in which the former kingdom’s leadership has been murdered, metaphorically to become a ghost of its former potent self.

Neither need spirits be singular or strictly linked to the past. In Shakespeare’s Richard III, for example, the titular character is visited in his sleep by a number of ghosts of various people whom he has murdered, and this dire omen, as Caesar’s ghost does to Brutus, presages his defeat and death in the upcoming battle of Bosworth Field.  However, in Macbeth, in addition to the prophesying spirits that appear to him in Act 4, scene 1, Macbeth is also shown a procession of future kings who will be descended from his former friend, Banquo.  These future ghosts have no dialogue, but they speak strangely to our sense of fate and predetermination, further accelerating Macbeth’s already rapid descent.    

Caesar’s ghost does this as well, not only indicating Brutus’ impending downfall, but also precipitating the denouement of the entire play.  Yet, in keeping with the nature of ghosts themselves, the appearance of Caesar’s ghost in Act 4 of Julius Caesar also encompasses a broader dimension than that of a simple perfunctory dramatic device.  On a character level, the ghost combines a quickening confluence of circumstances with a dramatic turning point, not just in the weary Brutus’ fortunes, but in the character’s mind and spirit as well. 

Appearing in the liminal space at the very edge of dreams, the ghost confronts a Brutus who has already been navigating psychologically choppy seas.  Just before the ghost’s appearance in the play, Brutus has argued with his co-conspirator, Cassius, and he has also been contemplating the death of his beloved wife, Portia.  The row with Cassius has hinted to Brutus that he may have been relatively isolated in the nobility of his own motivations in participating in Caesar’s assassination.  He has been pointedly confronted with the idea that other conspirators may have participated in the assassination more from hope of personal gain than from a genuine effort to secure the greater good of Rome. 

So, this phantom moment in the play characterizes profound emotional and intellectual isolation.  Even the musician has fallen asleep and the music has gone silent.  Alone with the deep ache of his wife’s recent death, with the chasm of potentially having committed to a questionably moral cause yawning abruptly at his feet, Brutus’ painful self-examination marks a true dark night of the soul.[i]  It is into such moments of emptiness that ghosts most often appear to us.

Enter the Ghost of CAESAR

BRUTUS

How ill this taper burns! Ha! who comes here?
I think it is the weakness of mine eyes
That shapes this monstrous apparition.
It comes upon me. Art thou any thing?
Art thou some god, some angel, or some devil,
That makest my blood cold and my hair to stare?
Speak to me what thou art.

GHOST

Thy evil spirit, Brutus.

BRUTUS

Why comest thou?

GHOST

To tell thee thou shalt see me at Philippi.

BRUTUS

Well; then I shall see thee again?

GHOST

Ay, at Philippi.

BRUTUS

Why, I will see thee at Philippi, then.

Exit Ghost[ii] 

The ghost’s response to Brutus’ opening question leaves open the kind of interpretive space that we often find elsewhere in Shakespeare, potentially allowing the line to be read in more than one way.  While the ghost seems to say that, as an “evil spirit”, it is a spirit of ill omen to Brutus, it also states that it is “thy” evil spirit, and perhaps signifying Brutus’ own evil, representing the ripening fruits of his character’s past associations and transgressions—his past participation in the confederacy to murder Caesar finally coming home to roost.   

If we consider “thy evil spirit, Brutus” as a kind of reflection of Brutus’ own evil, it harkens back to Cassius’ initial arguments to Brutus, when he first begins to beguile Brutus to join the conspiracy against Julius Caesar.  Cassius’ statement in Act 1 that “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings” (JC, 1.2.148-9) is reflexive, turning responsibility back upon the self.  Cassius speaks of personal advancement here, saying, “Brutus and Caesar—what should be in that ‘Caesar’? /Why should that name be sounded more than yours?” (150-1).  In spite of Brutus’ later assertion, “Did not great Julius bleed for justice’ sake?” (4.3.20), Caesar’s murder nonetheless retains the taint of having been motivated by personal gain, haunted by the ghost selfish glory possibly having supplanted the greater good.

Not surprisingly, Brutus seems somewhat resigned to the news that Caesar’s ghost will see him at Philippi.  His response, “Why, I will see thee at Philippi, then” indicates not so much surprise or indignation as recognition and a possible resignation.  For Brutus, from this point in the play, only the descent remains.

In terms of performance-based considerations, “enter the ghost of Caesar” tells us that the apparition should be recognizable—that the audience should be able to identify the ghost as Caesar’s as readily as Brutus does.  Caesar’s ghost speaks with Brutus directly, representative of an active past that remains with the audience in the ongoing world of the play.  Whether emblematic of the past mistakes, regret, or of the mounting force of impending failure the ghost’s presence remains a remarkably solid one, strongly indicating the approaching culmination of all of these forces.  It may even be seen as a materialisation of Brutus’ own collective sorrows, gathering upon the stage.

This idea is especially sobering, reminding us how much our own pasts remain always with us.  Our own sorrows and regrets wait just outside of our tents, ready to slip in and speak to us on late nights when we find ourselves so suddenly alone.  In these shadowed moments, faces of vanished friends return to us, as we face what we might have done differently in our own lives.  

In Julius Caesar, Caesar represents a great potential change for Rome.  Caesar’s ghost, however, seems to represent something much more personal to Brutus and to us.  It represents the things that haunt our lives and our dreams and return to us in our most solitary moments of reflection.  Shakespeare reminds us that we all have our own inescapable ghosts following us, and that this is part of life.  Ghosts represent those alchemical flashes when the past surfaces once again at the very moment that it transforms into the future. 

In this heartbreaking moment, Shakespeare condenses Brutus’ movement away from friendship, and from the best part of himself.  His loyalty has transformed into an empty scarecrow that overlooks mere rhetorical constructs of ‘honor’ and ‘nobility’.  Even before Marc Antony tears them down, those words ring hollow because they have somehow been brought to Brutus from outside himself.  In the moment that Caesar’s ghost confronts him, Brutus finally perceives his fatal mistakes as he faces a future that promises him the only kind of end to which such paths always seem to lead.

---

[i]  Brutus’ experience resonates strongly with the tortured isolation that frames La noche oxcura del alma, “The Dark Night of the Soul” written by the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross (San Juan de Cruz, 1542-1591). The opening lines of that poem read: On a dark night,/ Kindled in love with yearnings—oh, happy chance!—/ I went forth without being observed,/ My house being now at rest. (E.Allison Peers, trans.)

[ii] Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. Folger Digital Texts: Julius Caesar. Accessed January 13, 2019. https://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/html/JC.html. (4.3.317-30). All other references will be parenthetical references to this text.

At a pivotal moment in Measure for Measure, Duke Vincentio strives to convince the Provost that they can substitute the head of an executed prisoner in order to defer the unjust execution of a good man. Because the corrupt Angelo (who has been deputised as the acting Duke) has already scheduled the execution, Vincentio contrives this kind of bed trick*–or head trick as the case may be–where they will show Angelo the other prisoner’s head (a pirate named Barnardine) in order to convince him that it is the good man’s head instead, and that the scheduled execution has been carried out.

The Provost explains that it might be challenging to convince Angelo that the pirate’s head was actually the head of the good man, Claudio, because Angelo had seen both men, and knew what they both looked like. Vincentio has an answer for this too:

O, death’s a great disguiser; and you may add to it.
Shave the head, and tie the beard; and say it was
the desire of the penitent to be so bared before his
death: you know the course is common.

Measure for Measure 4.2.180-3

It may be arguable that we all look roughly the same after we’re dead, but with some grooming and a haircut, one corpse’s head might be rendered similar to another. Usually, we think of professional grooming sessions as a way to look our best and to emphasise the best points of our individual traits. Conformity doesn’t usually spring to mind except in terms of general style.

Yet, Shakespeare suggests that we may be all the same in death. Are we, all like the same animal once we’ve been beheaded? Once we’re baked into a pie perhaps? This essential question seems to have been hinted at in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and answered to a greater degree in the more recent Sweeney Todd. In their plot to bake their murder victims into pies to serve to an unsuspecting public in their London pie shop, Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett sing a famous duet about the quality of meat that different types of individuals, coming from different professions, might lend to the pies. One of the lyrics notes that, in the end, it hardly matters, and that “everybody goes down well with beer”.

Barbers might feature more frequently in drama and stories than we might realise, and this may be a much an older plot device than we know. Certainly one of the trickster servant personae is frequently that of an independent tradesman. An old plot that comes to us from the Commedia dell’arte goes like this:

A young man and woman fall in love. However, the young lady’s guardian is a singularly lecherous, greedy, and unwholesome old man who lusts after his ward and secretly means to marry her as soon as she comes of age. In the meantime, this powerful old man (a person of relatively high social status) keeps the lovely young woman locked away from anyone who might see her or desire her. The old man also has a lieutenant or sidekick who has few scruples, and who will help him make certain that everything goes according to his plans.

Luckily for the young lovers, help is at hand in the form of a clever ally–perhaps a friend or a servant–someone who feels obliged, or who may be, or may have been, in the young man’s debt in some way. This clever friend/servant decides to help the young lovers to get the young lady out of her guardian’s clutches, so that they may flee, be married, and begin a new life together.

Sounds like the setup for Sweeney Todd, and it is. But the same basic plot appears in many guises elsewhere throughout the dramatic universe. In the opera The Barber of Seville, for example, the young count Amaviva falls in love with the lovely Rosina, who is the ward of the lecherous old Dr. Bartolo. Yet, the count’s former servant, Figaro, who is a little like everyone’s favourite uncle or cousin, has recently established himself as a popular barber in the town of Seville, and he agrees to help the lovers get Rosina away from Dr. Bartolo.

In terms of the commedia dell’arte that flourished on Italian stages from roughly the 16th to the 18th century, these figures are all stock types to a greater or lesser extent. The young lovers (innamorati, the ‘enamored’), the pompous old man (Il Dottore, or doctor) who stands as an impediment to their romance, the Harlequin (Arlechino, a form of Zanni, or clown, who is often a trickster servant), and the various other servants, sidekicks, officers, and so on all stem from the Italian commedia, and probably arose before that time, becoming more established as useful types for illustrative drama through the ages.

In Everyman, a play from the late 15th century, for example, many of the stock characters are actually embodiments of human qualities. There is a doctor, a cousin, a messenger, and an angel, but there are also the characters Good Deeds, Strength, Beauty, Discretion, and Knowledge among others. It seems hardly surprising that human personalities to which we can easily relate today began to appear as dramatic conventions: the overbearing father, the concerned friend, the braggart soldier, the wise woman, the cruel despot.

Like many of these characters, the young lady’s disapproving guardian has so many incarnations that they can’t begin to be mentioned here. From Hermia’s disapproving father, Egeus, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the old merchant, Venturewell, whose daughter, Luce, is in love with Jasper Merrythought in the romantic satire The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Yet, in The Barber of Seville and Sweeney Todd, the servant or friend is a barber. Why? What might this character profession mean?

Of course, a barber potentially has access to many households. Most men, who theoretically must form at least half of the population of these households, usually need to shave periodically. But the barber also has another kind of access–a kind of intimacy which is innate to his profession. Bringing a razor so close to the human throat makes a nice metaphor for the kind of keen insight that barbers often gain into the lives and minds of those they shave. A barber hears things. Observes things. And a barber’s art takes time, in some cases, enough time to temporarily divert Il Dottore’s attention away from the innamorati, so that the young lovers can make plans. The fact that such diversions aren’t always successful doesn’t necessarily mean that they aren’t worth the effort expended in trying:

Figaro, the barber, here acts as a harlequin character type, the clever tradesman diverting the doctor’s attention from the lovers as they plan their escape.

Rossini’s well known operatic version of The Barber of Seville was based on a play (the first of a trio of plays) by French playwright, Pierre Beaumarchais.** We can see Figaro readily identified as a harlequin figure in this 19th century illustration of the shaving scene from Beaumarchais’ play:

In this illustration, the antecedent is clear (although perhaps the illustrator, or the director of the illustrated production had merely drawn the same kinds of conclusions). Masked like a zanni and dressed like a harlequin, Figaro prepares to shave a client with a terrifyingly enormous razor. Fear and humour are old friends, and often walk hand in hand, especially in drama.

An air of the mystical seems to hang about barbers in general. Here’s a scene from the 1972 film version of Man of La Mancha (where you’ll be familiar with the key players but you also might see a very young Brian Blessed in the background):

Of course, Peter O’Toole’s character, the genteel madman who believes himself to be the knight, Don Quixote de La Mancha, readily identifies the travelling barber’s shaving basin as a golden helmet with magical powers. And part of the point is that Don Quixote actually has a much more compelling perspective on life than those around him who subscribe to mundane ‘reality’.***

Passing the razor over’s skin also brings the sharp blade perilously close to the client’s lifeblood, putting the client’s life literally in the barber’s hands. If the barber in question should happen to be mad himself, or bent on revenge, or even both, the results could be much more shocking. This clip has been posted previously, with a trigger warning for those who might find it too violent or bloody, but it fits so well here, that here it is again. Sweeney Todd gives the truly evil Judge Turpin his final shave:

Even though he is perfectly poised to commit murder, the barber is everyman in a way. He is Harlequin, a tradesman or servant forever below the status of the households he serves, he also has access to them. He comes from the medical/bloodletting tradition of the Middle Ages, when his predecessors might have been the only doctors available to the populace. He may be, in many ways, the forerunner of the modern surgeon. Yet, he also lives firmly amongst the lower classes, a servant who must remain deferential to his masters.

Not only is Figaro what Royal Opera production manager Rachel Beaumont called “the universal personal handyman”, but he is also “smart, resourceful and will do any job that needs doing. Perhaps more than any other tradesman, he serves an essential purpose, but is despised for it – a pretty potent combination in [Beaumarchais’] pre-Revolutionary France.”****

Class is a real consideration here, and the power of tradesmen over the upper classes who seemed to hold almost all of the cards. For although the young lover Almaviva is a count, he enters the world of the The Barber of Seville disguised as a poor student (so that Rosina might opt for him independently of any potential influence of his social station or his wealth). This kind of entrance links the young count’s identity and sympathies with those of the middle and lower classes. Although the count pays Figaro well for his services, is it any wonder that Figaro readily sides with the young lovers against the aristocratic Dr. Bartolo? Is it any wonder that Sweeney Todd (derived from a popular penny dreadful) literally seeks to murder the class that continues to oppress him and others like him?

The Sweeney/Mrs. Lovett duet in Sweeney Todd ends with a vision that echoes that of the Duke above, a vision of death and consumption as the great human equaliser:

We’ll not discriminate great from small
No, we’ll serve anyone
Meaning anyone
And to anyone at all!

“A Little Priest”, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

However varied the above approaches may be, they all carry messages about class power. The Provost, who is guaranteed immunity by the Duke, will shave the pirate’s severed head to make it more like that of an innocent man, giving this officer a kind of power over Angelo’s perception of events. Figaro, who says he is “barber, surgeon, botanist, apothecary, veterinary”, is an enormously talented everyman, with a practical understanding of nearly every realm of human scientific development, is pitted against Dr. Bartolo, the pompously self professed “Doctor of Science”. The distinction between capability and vanity is pronounced. Sweeney Todd, an artist who understands both knives and human pain more deeply than anyone else, pursues his vengeance against a criminal judge, who presumably holds a regular power of life and death over those brought before him. Even Don Quixote’s travelling barber immediately sees through Don Quixote’s gentle madness, and estimates its harmlessness. Each of these characters, like the clever servant Harlequin before them, defies their masters on some level, precipitating various outcomes they desire in spite of the desires of those of higher social station.

When we look at the dates, Beaumarchais’ play in 1775 predates something like John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera in 1728, and prefigures Brecht’s 1929 Threepenny Opera (based on the work of Gay and of French poet, François Villon) by more than a century. Of course, class struggle is nothing new. Even now, the financial papers continue to extol the virtues of low unemployment numbers in the United States. Unemployment has now dropped to 3.7 percent in the U.S., the lowest since 1969 we are told.

Still, it has said that “Of course unemployment figures are low. Everyone works three jobs just to make ends meet.” Underemployment remains the elephant in the room and there are no signs that this problem will go away anytime soon. People can’t really live on what they earn, even when working full time. https://www.npr.org/2018/07/15/629212924/the-call-in-underemployment

What might this mean, if anything? Well, look beyond your local, high priced ‘hair salon’ where they charge women £50 and more for a haircut. Look beyond adding highlights or a dye job for £ 80 and up. Look beyond the local ‘fast cuts’, where they charge (in the U.S.) $18 plus an expected tip for the stylist for a simple trim. No. Look for a barber. Look for a professional trained in classic hairstyles, and one who will cut anyone’s hair well, regardless of what they might want. Old school. Trained in the old ways of not just hairstyle, but how an individual style might look on a particular individual. Look hard though, because the basic, well-trained barber is a disappearing profession. Oh, people still need them, but barbers can’t survive on what they might make either, they have been forced to leave their shops in search of other work. You doubt that? Read this: http://theconversation.com/goodbye-to-the-barbershop-63168 High priced alternatives may be on the rise, but the corner barber? No. Clockmakers, tinkers, knife grinders, even the corner mechanic, all the tradesmen of the old days seem to be vanishing.

Overbearing, lecherous, pompous, powerful men? There seems to be no shortage of those. However, if you happen to be a young lover in need of help, don’t look for a servant, because most people really don’t have those anymore. Don’t look for a barber either. He or she probably won’t be around.

____________________________________

*A bed trick is a dramatic convention (often appearing in early modern plays, but used elsewhere as well) where one lover substitutes for another, often in order to consummate a marriage or to link a wrongly spurned lover to a less than willing partner. In Measure for Measure, Mariana has been betrothed to Angelo, who had refused to fulfill his betrothal to her when her dowry was lost at sea. When Angelo later blackmails Isabella to sleep with him, Mariana goes to him in the darkness instead, and this ‘bed trick’ fulfills the betrothal between Mariana and Angelo after all.

**Pierre Beaumarchais’ title may have been a pun on the title of an earlier Spanish play by Tirso de Molina called El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (‘The seducer/trickster of Seville and the stone guest’), or the similarity may be coincidental. It is interesting to note that Beaumarchais originally conceived his play as an opéra comique, but it was rejected as such by the Comédie-Italienne. It was eventually performed at the Comédie-Française. Although several people have written scores for operatic versions of the work, the enduring version of The Barber of Seville that remains most famous today was scored by Giochinno Rossini with an Italian libretto by Cesare Sterbini.

***This is another case of a musical play that has been derived from another work. Dale Wasserman’s Man of La Mancha is based on Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which is one of the foundational works of western literature and says much about reality, perception, conceptions of honour, and the human condition.

****I urge you to read this great article by Rachel Beaumont for the Royal Opera House production of The Barber of Seville in 2016: https://www.roh.org.uk/news/who-was-the-barber-of-seville

Let this particular question from Lear’s fool sink in for a moment as we step beyond specific literary criticism. For the question encompasses the destruction of the world, in the same way “what’s next?” might ask us to move on from something already finished. “What does this mean?” That question implies that the ‘this’ in the question has already happened, or is already happening, already in motion.

How now? What now? How do we proceed now? How is the cosmos in this instant, uncle? Where are we headed, and why am I in this handcart (as the popular bumper sticker asks)?

John Moriarty mentions this particular question in terms of “Nietzsche’s discovery and subsequent collapse”*, the alpha and omega of the universe rolled into a simple sort of “How d’you do?”

Let’s look around outside the usual plays and passages for a moment, just to see what might have slipped through the cracks. Let’s see, if we can, what might have fallen away unnoticed while we looked too closely at what was in our hands. That’s where all the interesting material (and immaterial) is anyway. In the magician’s other hand, the secret sword of the Tai Chi master. Whether it be Chen, Yang, Wu, Sun or Hao, the secret sword is always there. Universal balance, because you can’t just hold a sword in one hand and hope to see a complete picture. We need a magic wand to truly see.

Traditionally, fools performed this function on many levels–the function of seer, I mean, in a social sense, and in a broader sense as well–perceiving what was either hidden or beyond the social of reach of others, who might have to be more respectful than a fool had to be. A jester’s marotte (the stick with a jester’s head) signified not only the office, but multiple perspectives. Sometimes a marotte had both a happy and a sad face, an echo of the comic and tragic masks of drama, signifying that the jester could see both ways, or many ways, at once.

A fool or jester not only reveals the workings of the great mythologies directing the scenes around us, but also points out the myths by which we might be navigating our own lives, especially when those myths might be the wrong ones–myths running counter to our own best interests or the interests of those closest to us. The fool is both social commentator and illustrator. In a sense, the fool may constantly endanger herself in the doing of her job. Sometimes, we recognise the fool’s wisdom, and sometimes we snort in self righteous indignation, threatening and stamping while our would be enemy stands powerless on a molehill, wearing a paper crown (but we were talking about Lears, not Henries):

http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/306725/Ran-Movie-Clip-Lord-And-Master.html **

In John Moriarty’s autobiography, nostos, he describes his ‘way’ or hodos. He says, “My hodos has been a mythodos, a road measured not in miles but in myths, sometimes in many myths simultaneously.”* Life often seems like this, like a molten field of many myths all around us, constantly changing, bubbling, melting together and sometimes trickling away in parts. Joseph’s coat of many colours, effortlessly blending qualities of admiration and resentment. Constantly, we struggle for apprehension, for understanding, for a sense of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ or just an indication of which way to go. And sometimes our perspectives remain at war with one another even as our world remains both incendiary and eternally fluid.

In the old stories, the holy, avenging angel of righteousness carries a flaming sword–the “fateful lightning” of the terrible, swift sword in the Battle Hymn of the Republic. The angel of darkness carries a flaming sword too–a sword that smokes and shrieks as it moves through the air. When they meet, they meet in the most dangerous of terrains, the ever shifting landscape of the world’s perpetual creation and destruction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB1737OJCA0

A bit heavy handed? Perhaps. But this scene is the death of friendship, the demise of love, and it marks the dimming of the light in the universe. (Of course, I hardly need to tell you that. Most of you saw the picture.)

The artists of Hollywood can express both subtlety and over the top excitement, but this is because they have been tasked with convincing the audience to buy a ticket to the film, or perhaps rent the film later. This does not invalidate the broader metaphor (nor the extended Buddhist metaphor of light cutting through our perception of existence–but more of that another time). In fact, if we return to Kurosawa’s Ran, the burning world returns, along with the vision of hell around us as particularly malevolent forces of change marching through our existence.

The sword of Damocles (the sword suspended by a single horsehair above the throne), goes along with power. Great power and authority. Great danger as well. Not just from others, but also from ourselves.

Worldly power promotes not only the possibility of hubris, but also of a worldview, a perspective too often based on assumptions. We begin to believe that reality must be exclusively a certain way. That a certain religion is the only way, or a certain perspective is necessarily ‘correct’, even if it condemns others who do not conform somehow (although they may be hurting no one). We become convinced that the world works a certain way, and perhaps that we are also a certain way, that we are either this person or that person.

Yet all these worldviews, when held to be absolute and exclusive, shimmer like horizons on a desert. Their heat rises from the hell that can materialise anywhere, on the edges of our existence, on the margins of our personality, in near or far corners of our mind, or on borders between faiths or countries. Economic sabers rattling. Threatening. Spluttering. Blustering.

When the world begins to bluster and flicker so do our limited attentions dance. They settle first on one thing, and then on another. We stop reading. We focus only on what may further our aims of personal fortune and power, as though those might actually save us. All around us, our own bleeding former kingdom lies broken, steeped in tears and sorrow. We remember lapwings and starlight, but that memory alone cannot coerce that old golden light to return. We stuff our mouths with platitudes, with the rhetoric of nobility, of greatness. Blaming others in our climbing, we claim things out loud to those we think of as stupid masses, things that we would never tell ourselves at home.

These words become ashes. Empty. Burned away in the light of whatever reality might lie outside of them. Washed away in storms on the heath. The reality of what Lear is, of what we are, and what the heads of state really are as well. It all comes thundering silently across our lives, the great beast stalking us. Perhaps it is Don Quixote’s knight of mirrors, but perhaps it is the error in the cave, our own shadow.

One day Yanguan called to his attendant, “Bring me the rhinoceros fan.”
The attendant said, “The fan is broken.”
Yanguan said, “If the fan is broken, then bring me back the rhinoceros!”
The attendant had no reply.
Zifu drew a circle and wrote the word ‘rhino’ inside it.****

Like the fan in the koan, we humans live in a broken reality, a reality that includes dissatisfaction and no having of the cakes AND eating them! You’ll spoil your appetite.

Appetites. There’s the rub. Ooh, there and a little lower.

(Yeah, okay. I’m following here until we get to that rhino thing above. Then, I just don’t get it. What the hell does any of that mean?)

The typical answer may be that Zen koans like the rhinoceros fan are designed to break logic, but they do so by cutting logic off at its very stem. That logic, assumption, even perception, may all be mistaken in ways that diminish us and our experience of reality. King Lear seems like this. His belief that he may give away his power and keep his titles and authority is founded in foolishness. We can see it. We sit outside the play saying, “Don’t go into the spooky, dark room alone! Don’t be trusting your sycophantic daughters with your butcher knife and hockey mask! Just don’t. Don’t open that door!”

We can see it, but Lear cannot. The aging king is trapped inside his own play, with only a few people (his fool and Kent) to tell him the truth. But maybe Shakespeare is telling us how much we are trapped within our own individual plays as well. Maybe part of the point is not just how an aging man may make mistakes, but how mistaken we might be in what we really believe, in what we are absolutely certain must be true.

In the case of the rhinoceros fan, only Zifu’s action seems to accomplish anything. Zifu is the only person who actually does anything, although that action, like most actions in the real world, may still seem like very little in the big scheme of things. But that’s part of the point too. Action is all that saves us from the terrors of our own (so often misplaced) convictions, but from what does action ultimately save us in the end?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=12&v=hUJoR4vlIIs

Some clever material. Good acting. Thanks to Amazon, even Armageddon may be reduced to a smart and slick television series, ripe for inveterate binge watchers. We can all sit at home, subscribed to our corporate overlords’ services, and laugh at the end of the world. At least it employs the actors.

Still, there’s always a more sobering side. The pretty wife can’t always slip her husband’s soul out of the knot by asking the devil a question he can’t answer (in the most well known case, asking which end of her new ornate bonnet is the front). We don’t often, don’t usually, get off so lightly. Our sins become our scorpions, filling our minds, homing in on us from all our pasts.

We believe that we seek truth in the world. In fact, perhaps we seek something else. Comfort? Along with all that power and riches material that has already been mentioned. Too often, perhaps, we seek some universal justification for the worldview, the perspective, that we already have. There may be some deal with the universe, some bargain of which we are largely unaware, but it also may be true that there is no bargain. That if we seek to cut some kind of deal with a power or powers greater than ourselves, that all bets are off. We cannot force perspective. We can only allow it.

In The Revolt of the Angels, Anatole France writes of the moment that Lucifer the fallen angel becomes Satan the adversary. “In these silent realms where we are fallen, let us meditate, seeking the hidden causes of things; let us observe the course of nature; let us pursue her with compelling ardour and all-conquering desire; let us strive to penetrate her infinite grandeur, her infinite minuteness.”****** Like much of Satan’s rhetoric, it sounds almost reasonable until we realise that he also seems to be describing not just a quest for understanding, but a rape.

Seeking the hidden causes of things? Evident causes may be complicated enough. It might be best simply to seek life. Quiet. Unassuming. With whatever affirmations we may have resting in ourselves and not imposed on others. That may be where we should build the house. In that neighbourhood. Where we can picture just how life should be, how it certainly will be. Where the neighbours look so nice. Just like us.

*Moriarty, John. Nostos. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2001.

**Ran. Directed by Akira Kurosawa. Japan: Universal Pictures, 1985.

***Star Wars – Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Directed by George Lucas. USA: Lucasfilm Ltd., 2005.

****Cleary, Thomas. Book of Serenity: One Hundred Zen Dialogues. Boston: Shambala, 2005. Koan 25.

*****Good Omens. UK and USA: Amazon and BBC Studios, 2019

******France, Anatole. The Revolt of the Angels. Mrs. Wilfred Jackson, trans. London: J. M Dent, 1941.